Month: December 2013

Internal Project – Step 1 – Document the UI

~ David Cameron ~ Leave a comment

I’ve started putting together the UI for my home project.

You can see this in all it’s glory at https://github.com/dcamdupe/status.

Here is a sneak peek:

Home page version 1
Home page version 2
These high quality wireframes help illustrate a number of things:
  1. I don’t have access to appropriate tools at home. Rather than buying them, I’m using the highly technical approach of pen + paper + iPhone camera to capture my wireframes
  2. My hand writing is frighteningly messy
  3. In version 2 I’ve avoided the traditional wooden table for a far more attractive red table cloth with stars
For version 2 of the wireframes, I’ve tightened things up a little and used more consistent UI elements. This might not be apparent, given my limited ability with a pen. I also noticed I missed a page and a few other major elements on the pages.
I’m skipping a few normal user lifecycle elements (forgotten password etc) for simplicity’s sake.
The only thing that might not make immediate sense is the popularity box. This will be some sort of synthesis of the number of views and likes to provide an overall popularity. This could be represented by a number, an image or just a colour.

2014-01-05 Updated to link to earlier article.

Internal Project

~ David Cameron ~ Leave a comment

I’ve decided to start a home project to test a few different technologies. The aim is to pick a a relatively simple project and implement this in a few different ways.

The simple project is a website where someone can post a status.

The rough outline is a website where:

  • Authenticated Users can:
    • post a status
  • Anonymous & Authenticated users can:
    • View current Status
    • View past statuses and search through them
    • ‘Like’ a Status

I guess you could call this twitter without most of the useful features.

I’m aiming to try a number of different technologies, in decreasing level of comfort.

I’ll also be swapping pieces in and out with new implementations in different technologies.

The current plan

  1. Document the UI – I’ve found this tends to make the implementation clearer
  2. Implement in bootstrap, MVC4 with SQL Server backend
  3. Swap the SQL Server backend for a No SQL database
  4. Design JSON API to access app
  5. Implement JSON api using WebApi backend
  6. Replace MVC app with javascript client side framework (currently planning to try angular)
  7. Replace the WebApi backend with an F# implementation
  8. Replace the WebApi backend with node.js
I want to apply best practices throughout, which might mean learning new best practices as I start using new technologies.

I’ll post all parts of the implementation and any documentation on Github.